The Management of Global Careers

“Every boring or mundane activity you experience at home is, when you move to a foreign country, suddenly transformed into an exciting adventure” according to Reannon Muth, a travel writer. Indeed, it has long been known that some of the key drivers for global careers are adventure, excitement and learning (Hippler 2009; Doherty et al. 2011). While global careers and these worldwide talent management and knowledge flows are key ingredients for organizational success (Scullion and Collings 2011), our understanding of international work and careers has dramatically advanced in the last decades. This book outlines a vast array of recent insights into global careers and charts this dynamic field in order to allow global careerists and their families, multinational corporations (MNCs) and other key stakeholders to make better informed decisions. In so doing, the book moves beyond the basic insights depicted above to reflect the huge diversity of global career contexts and actors.

When counting the number of internationally mobile employees (IMEs) and analyzing the consequences of international mobility in order to improve the management of different kinds of IMEs, who counts as an expatriate (and its variants) is of crucial importance. Yet there is no consensus on a single definition of, for example, a “selfinitiated expatriate” or a “migrant” (Anderson and Blinder 2015). Tharenou (2015), in a comparative review of the literatures on assigned expatriates (AEs), self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) and skilled immigrants, recently warned not to combine these conceptually distinct groups of globally mobile individuals, as doing so contaminates the results, posing a threat to the validity of our findings. In pursuit of exactness, preciseness and completeness, we find many authors who seek to define (new) types of IMEs based on an increasing number of criteria. We want to question the added value of doing so and formulate a plea for a sound theory of expatriation types.

In this chapter, we will first discuss the motives of both assigned expatriates (AEs) and self-initiated foreign expatriates (SIEs) for international work. Second, the nature of careers and jobs of AEs and SIEs are analysed. Third, we discuss the outcomes of expatriation for different types of expatriates. After that, we will explore the management of such expatriates. Finally, we will draw some conclusions and discuss future research needs.

This chapter introduces coaching, discusses the unique features and challenges evolving from the global mobility context and presents various aspects of coaching in an international environment. Empirical research on expatriate coaching is reviewed and coaching experiences of two different kinds of expatriates are presented. Finally, the chapter ends with some concluding words and ideas for future research.

Career studies have, at best, partly kept pace with the enormous rise of international work. While on virtually all accounts such as volume of international business transactions, importance of organizations operating across national and cultural boundaries or individuals pursuing an international or global career indicators point towards growth, the body of career-related research on this has not grown to the same extent. With the exception of expatriation and its various facets such as classic expatriation (Bader et al. 2016), self-initiated expatriation (Andresen et al. 2013) or migration (Solimano 2010), systematic research about various aspects of careers in different countries and cultures, in particular in a comparative sense (Lazarova et al. 2012), has only started to emerge.

Most of the typologies in literature model international work experience as a single career step in work life. In doing so, they omit a long-term career perspective including multiple career moves in different foreign countries as are typical for so-called global careers (Mäkelä and Suutari 2009). To manage these global careers successfully, detailed knowledge about individual, organizational and societal needs is necessary. However, only few research studies about global careerists exist to date.

The international human resource management (IHRM) literature tends to develop various forms of international contracts (see Dickmann and Baruch, 2011, for an exhaustive review) in order to increase retention post expatriation and limit the challenges linked to repatriation (Mayerhofer et al., 2004). Nevertheless, to date and to our knowledge, a new form of expatriation rarely highlighted in the literature and somehow quite similar to classic expatriation is emerging: ‘individual offshoring.’ This new form of international assignment offers a relatively limited benefit package in comparison to the classic expatriation. In other words, as highlighted in this case study, individual offshoring aims at performing the exact same job abroad with a permanent geographical relocation. Nevertheless, it encompasses less-attractive packages compared to other forms of international assignments (IAs). It also offers no guarantee of return and it does not take the family into consideration even though this is considered as important in the expatriation literature (Dickmann and Baruch, 2011; Al Ariss and Crowley-Henry, 2013).

The infectious need to globalize has ostensibly led firms to increasingly appoint inpatriates, although their defined value and impact across contexts such as country location and hierarchical levels remain largely unexplored (Maley and Kramar 2010; Moeller and Reiche 2017; Reiche et al. 2009). Recent research suggests that inpatriates are progressively used to a similar extent as expatriates (Collings et al. 2010; Harzing et al. 2016) as a way to achieve a global core competency at headquarter (HQ) locations (Harvey and Novicevic 2000b; Harvey and Buckley 1997; Tungli and Peiperl 2009). Mirroring the growth in corporate interest in inpatriate staffing is survey data which observes a relatively high percentage (57%) of employees being relocated either to or from the HQ country (BGRS 2015), although this non-discerning relocation percentage includes estimated inpatriate (to HQ) and expatriate (from HQ) statistics. Parallel to the discussion of inpatriate value and impact at HQ and beyond, the pattern of inpatriate career lifecycles which could possibly impact their value proposition remains inconclusive at best.

Repatriation encompasses the phase in which individuals return from an international work experience. Regardless of whether the transition takes place within one organization or across organizations, returning home after working abroad constitutes a critical step for an individual’s future career. In this chapter, we review individuals’ experiences from the expatriation-repatriation transition period with regard to their longer-term career decisions. We take into account the challenges and opportunities that repatriation entails as well as the implications of repatriation for individuals’ global careers, and we suggest areas for further research.

Dual-career expatriation remains a challenge and a top concern for most companies. In a departure from established thinking, we debunk the idea of a universal concept in which there is only one type of dual-career expatriate spouse to conceptualise them as belonging instead to one of four distinct profiles that we term the ‘R’ profile: Ready, Reborn, Resentful and Resigned. The purpose of our typology is to help scholars take a fresh look at the dual-career issue by examining the success factors of expatriate trailing spouses that have sustained a career while living abroad. Our goal is to understand how their career success has been achieved and why some are more successful than others.

Owing to the increasing number of studies on expatriates, their partners and families, we are starting to understand the main challenges related to work and personal life interaction involved with international mobility. Moreover, the first edited book on the work-life interface (WLI) in the context of international careers has recently been published (Mäkelä and Suutari 2015). In this chapter, we aim to draw together what is known about the interaction between working life and personal life (including family) in regard to the spheres of different types of internationally mobile professionals. We start from the discussion on negative interactions between these two life spheres. Next, we will complement the picture by discussing the often-forgotten side of these experiences—the positive experiences of international professionals and their families. Given the large amount of transference between the work and non-work spheres of families during international assignments, it is also important to understand the ways in which organisations can help expatriates and their families. We will thus also discuss how firms can manage the WLI issues of their internationally mobile staff.

Compensation is a key strategic component of the management of international assignments. It is, nonetheless, the area to which the academic literature has paid the least attention, focusing instead almost exclusively on business practice. Over these first years of the twenty-first century, the compensation of international assignees has undergone numerous changes, although there still lacks a holistic proposal that addresses all the challenges and difficulties present in this field (McNulty 2014; Caligiuri and Bonache 2016).